The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories by Etgar Keret Page B

to have me there, and kept trying to stuff me with food. There’s something nice about home cooking. I mean, it’s hard to explain, but there’s something special about it, a feeling. As if your stomach can figure out that it’s food you didn’t have to pay for, that someone actually made it out of love. And after all those pizza joints and Chinese takeouts and junk that my stomach’s taken in since I got here, I bet it appreciated the gesture. To thank me, it sent these heat waves up to my chest every once in a while. “She’s a real shark, our mom,” Uzi went, and hugged his tiny mother real tight without even letting go of the silverware. Uzi’s mom laughed and asked if we wanted some more
kishke
, his father got in another lame joke, and for a second there I actually started missing my own parents even though before I offed myself, their nagging used to freak me out.

CHAPTER FIVE
    in which Mordy and Gelfand’s kid brother do the dishes
    A fter dinner I sat in the living room with the rest of them. Uzi’s dad turned on the TV. There was this boring talk show on, and he kept swearing at everyone on the show. Uzi’d had a whole bottle of wine with his dinner, and just passed out on the couch. It was getting pretty tired, so me and Uzi’s kid brother Ronny said we’d do the dishes even though Uzi’s mom said don’t bother. Ronny washed and I dried. I asked him how he’s makin’ out ’cause I know he offed not so long ago, and people are usually pretty much in a daze when they get here, at least in the beginning. But Ronny just shrugged and said he thinks OK. Then he said: “If it hadn’t been for Uzi, I’da been herea long time ago.” We did all the dishes and we were putting them away when Ronny started telling me this really weird story about how once, when he was just ten maybe, he took a cab, on his own, to see the two Tel Aviv soccer teams play each other. He was dead gone on the yellow team, with the hats and the pennants and everything, and all through the game they were right on top of the other side’s goal. Those guys couldn’t keep the ball for two passes in a row. But then, eight minutes before the end of the game, the other team scored an offside goal. No two ways about it. It was such an obvious offside—like the replays they show on TV. The yellows tried to argue, but the referee gave the goal, and that was that. The other team won, and Ronny went home totally burned up. Uzi was hung up on fitness in those days. He was going into the army, and he was dead set on trying out for a combat unit. And Ronny, who idolized him, took his jump rope and tied it to the horizontal bar that Uzi put up in the yard. Then he shouted to Uzi, who was cramming for some final or something, to come right away, and told him the whole thing about the game, and about the goal and about how unfair it was and everything, and how he didn’t see the point of going on living in a world that’s so unfair that the team you love could lose just like that, even when they didn’t deserve to. And that he was only telling Uzi because Uzi was probably the smartest guy Ronny knew, so unless Uzi could give him one good reason to go on living, he was gonna off himself, and that was that. The whole time Ronny talked, Uzi didn’t say a word, and even afterward, when it was his turn to saysomething, he just kept quiet, and instead of talking, he took one step forward and slapped Ronny so hard that it sent him flying two yards back, and then he just turned around and went back to his room to cram some more. Ronny says it took him a while to get over being slapped, but soon as he got up he untied the rope, and put it back and went to take a shower. He never talked to Uzi about the meaning of life again after that. “I don’t know exactly what he was trying to tell me when he slapped me like that,” Ronny said, laughing,